Did you hear the big news, as reported in Downtown Journal, that the Travail crew is about to open a North Loop restaurant called Bear Cheese? Well, it’s not true. There is a restaurant opening, rumored to be a party-bar by the party-bar owners Pour House, and it is being helmed by two chefs who worked at Travail, Nick O’Leary and Tyler Shipton, but as neither of those people are Travail’s chef-owners, calling it a Travail restaurant is not true. And the real Travail folks do not want their bankers, currently considering them for a loan to relocate Travail, to hear through the grapevine that they’re overextended with undisclosed business obligations on the side. “It is not us. I can guarantee you that,” chef James Winberg, who really, truly co-owns Travail with Mike Brown and Bob Gerken. “They told me not to talk to anyone about it, so I’m not talking about it,” Mike Brown said. “But I named Bear Bear, and I named Cheese Cheese, and they’re like brothers to us and worked on our line for a year and a half. And one day I said it would be really cool if they opened a restaurant called Bear Cheese so I guess they might be opening a restaurant called Bear Cheese. I hope everything goes really well there. But it’s not Travail two opening up.”
